"Imagination has been steadily losing prestige in American life, it seems to me, for a long time."

"I am speaking of the poetic imagination. Inferior kinds of imagination have prospered, but the poetic has less credit than ever before. Perhaps that is because there is less room than ever for the personal, spacious, unanxious and free, for the unprepared, unorganized, and spontaneous elements from which poetic imagination springs."

Saul Bellow, speaking to us from his time machine.